Posted on 04/05/2011 5:06:36 AM PDT by ShadowAce
After spending months on end watching Mozilla Firefox 4 go through eleven-and-some-odd betas, I’m less than impressed with what I’ve waited for all this time. The first time I launched a fresh install of Firefox 4 and navigated to the homepage of the New York Times, it hung for almost a minute on end – and then every ad block on the page burped with a “Flash plugin has crashed” message.
This is progress?
I know I’m not alone in this, either – many folks I know who had been suffering through successive Firefox betas were disillusioned with the quality of the release product. They’re either rolling back to Firefox 3.6 or ditching it entirely.
Me, I’d ditched Firefox for Chrome back around revision 3.4 or so. Maybe earlier.
Like too many other software projects before it, Firefox is starting to suffer from the very things it was originally developed to avoid. It’s falling victim to the exact stagnation that plagued Netscape before it. The competition – not just Chrome, but even lowly old Internet Explorer, now in its ninth version – is outpacing it in greater strides.
In short, there’s now less reason than ever to be a Firefox user.
That’s a shame, because Firefox isn’t a bad piece of software. It’s just increasingly suffering from third-wheel syndrome, which it hasn’t found an effective way to lick yet.
Google Chrome, by contrast, has come from behind to eclipse Firefox in a whole slew of ways. On the same hardware, it launches and browsers more quickly and with less inexplicable lag than Firefox. Flash doesn’t hiccup or stall, and hasn’t bombed on me at all for a few versions running now.
Google Chrome’s add-on architecture is a lot easier to work with and requires a prospective software author to jump through far less hoops. Its page debugging and inspection tools are remarkable; I rely on them constantly. And while running each tab in its own process is more memory-hungry than Firefox, at least I know that memory’s being put to good use: if one tab stalls, the rest don’t.
But wait: I’m not just here to bury Firefox and praise Chrome. If anything, I’d like to see Firefox rise all the more to the challenge and give Chrome a run for its money. I just don’t see that happening with Firefox’s current development cycle.
Mozilla is talking about ramping up their releases to match Chrome’s, but I’m not sure that’s enough. What might be needed are solutions that are either far more precise than what Mozilla is dreaming up, or way more radical than they will aim for.
When Firefox came along, it was a welcome relief from the tired and stagnant Netscape. Here was a browser that threw out everything that didn’t need to be there, gave the user a snappy browsing experience, and offered a far more appealing alternative to Internet Explorer.
The whole reason all this was possible was because Firefox was a radical break from the past – an experimental branch of Mozilla that overtook the parent. Firefox left behind more baggage than it kept, and the end result was a massive success story.
Maybe it’s time to do that again. Let’s have a spinoff of Firefox that is to that browser what Firefox itself was to Netscape. Not just another iteration in Firefox’s development, but a clean slate – a way to get back to the basics that the original iterations of Firefox prided itself on and were valued for in the first place.
This is something that might only be possible by a third party, though. Only a third party might have the distance required to take Firefox, strip out everything that no longer needs to be there, and start over again with as little of Mozilla’s existing baggage as possible. The hard part isn’t getting the code (Firefox is open source, after all). The hard part would be assembling a development team willing to commit to a project of that scope.
Much as I like to believe in the romance of open source, a project like this isn’t something you can do on nights and weekends – not in a competitive fashion, that is. That might well prove to be a bigger obstacle than writing the code: finding and supporting people who can do it and get it out the door in a timely way.
Maybe kicking off a whole new branch of Firefox is too radical a suggestion for most people. Barring that, I took a look at the Firefox roadmap for 2011 to see what Mozilla itself has in mind.
There are a lot of goals here, and it’s not clear which goals are being targeted for what versions or if they’re all being attacked simultaneously. What’s more, there’s a lot of things discussed here that still don’t have any major relevance to users. Example: “Expand the Open Web Platform to include Apps, Social and Identity.” This could easily mean anything. And at any rate, it doesn’t add up to much right now given that most people are just surrendering and using Facebook to sign into everything.
(It’s a nice goal for Mozilla to promote more open-ended identity frameworks, but to my mind it’s pointless, given that the very browser being used to do the signing in keeps grinding to a crawl.)
My suggestion is this: Pick one major goal per iteration of Firefox, and commit everyone across the board to making that goal real.
The first goal I recommend is an expanded version of item #2 on the Firefox list: Declare an all-out war on lag.
Find every possible reason why the browser lags, slows down, or stalls entirely and get rid of it. Since the reasons for such a thing may be rampant throughout the product, that means you have all the more reason to make such an effort an all-fronts war and not just an ongoing priority.
Get that investigated, get it done, and release a version of the product where that is the major reason for an upgrade. If the answers lie in a bad user configuration, then at the very least let the user know that’s the culprit. Don’t give him an excuse to leave.
The same one-major-problem-at-a-time approach should also be applied to problems with Flash, and to the other show-stopping, browser-wide issues that everyone complains about.
These things are scaring people off, and they need to be attacked as fiercely as they can.
It’s not hard to read Mozilla’s stated goal of releasing new iterations of the browser more often, and with more revisions to the left of the decimal point, as a way to play catch-up with Chrome.
The thing is, releases and revisions are entirely arbitrary: it doesn’t matter what they call the next iteration of Firefox. What matters more is how each revision represents real advances for the state of the program that end users can bank on.
Without that, no product is worth building on as a base of productivity. A stagnant program is just as unusable as one revised without clear goals.
What I really don’t want to see is Firefox become to browsers what Ubuntu has become to Linux distributions. I don’t want them shipping a product every six months whether we like it or not, one where there are at least as many regressions as there are advances.
And, most of all, I don’t want to turn my back on a browser that did a lot to make the Web what it is now. But software’s about what works, not where your heart’s at – and right now, for me, Chrome is what works. Firefox remains under wraps.
BTTT
One thing that is “broken” with FF 4.0. I am NOT a mac person at all but I have a secondary computer at work which is a PPC-based Mac G5 that I use mostly for VNC and Web. Anyway, I donwloaded FF 4.0 and installed it (but it has a circle with a line drawn through it) so of course it doesn’t work.
FF 4.0 does not support PPC-architecture for MacOS and apparently never will. So that is broken - at least in my book.
Somebody get this guy a copy editor. After the 4th painfully bad chunk of English (”launches and browsers”?! WHAT) I could no longer take his opinion seriously.
I don’t know what this guy is talking about. FF 4 works just great on my machine and it is faster than the older version I replaced. Everyone I know who has upgraded to 4 loves it,except for the moving of the refresh button, but that is minor. FF doesn’t need saving, it is doing just fine as it is.
I use Pale Moon, which is a fork of Firefox, which is more lean, it comes up much faster, it may not have all of the bells and whistles, but it does what I need.
i like the new firefox, but i cannot run yahoo games on it.
I don't know, because all I did was down load FF4 and the Norton icon lite up and said it was recognized and is safe.
My Norton Security Suite has 4 parts, 1) PC Security 2) Identity Protection 3) Backup 4) Tune up. They all work, and that's as technical as I can go.
I don't buy Norton, it comes with Comcast so I don't know the version of Norton.
True dat.
I’ve been using FF 4 since Beta 6 on a 6 months old HP laptop and I have had zero problems. It’s much faster than v3, it hasn’t hung, crashed or not handled things it should handle. It asks to install plugins when appropriate and they work right the first time.
I’ve also got it on an older Gateway desktop running Vista. That one my granddaughter uses when here on weekends and not one single problem with FF on that one either.
This guy needs to know what he’s talking about before he slams an excellent product. If he can’t install it or use it correctly, that isn’t FF’s fault.
Right-click on the Menu bar, click on 'customize' and drag the reload button to where you want it. Works fine on Linux Mint 10.
Funny I just ran across this thread because I just dumped foxfire after upgrading ?to it’s newest version
Got sick of the stalls, hiccups, freezes, burps
Went to crome tonight
Thank you!! I thought it was just me forgetting where it was found.
FF 4 is neat and I like it.
That worked, thanks. I had opened customize but didn’t think of dragging the new button duh.
Better for all 3 machines we’ve updated. All running XP SP3, 2 of them fairly sturdy beasts with 2 GB RAM, another an ancient clunker with 512 MB. No crashes, notedly faster.
I’ll update the Vista box soon also, but for now I have one addon that hasn’t been updated and I’d like to keep it around til it is.
You need to make sure Java is updated then, and make sure anything like Noscript is set to allow it. I just loaded Yahoogames Literati to check and it works fine here.
thanks.
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